Transcription
So critique number one was, well, who exactly are the people? Of course, in any society, people want many things. Some people want clean air, others want cheap fuel, some want more taxes on the rich, others want lower taxes overall. So when a leader says, "I'm doing what the people want," Schumpeter asks, "Which people?" His argument essentially was, the people is a myth. It's a fiction. In a democracy, there are individuals, there are groups, but there's no one unified will of the people. And if that's the case, then we can't judge a government's democratic nature by whether it claims to serve the people.
Now, you might say, "Well, just hold an election. Let the majority decide. Doesn't that tell us what the people want?" Well, not really. That gets us to our critique number two. Schumpeter asked his readers, "Let's assume for a moment that there is a single thing that people would want. How would we ever know what the people want?" Now, you might think, "Okay, let's just have an election. Majority is an expression or at least an approximation of what the people want." But Schumpeter said, "Not really, because who counts as the majority actually depends very much on the rules of the game."
Let me give you an example. South Korea uses a so-called first-past-the-post electoral system to elect its president. The idea is, whoever wins the most votes wins. But South Korea's parliament's Congress uses proportional representation. Parties get seats based on their share of the votes. Now, if you applied one set of voting rules to one branch, you'd end up with totally different outcomes than what you have today. So Schumpeter's point was, you can't really say what the people want without knowing the rules. And sometimes those rules matter even more than the actual preferences of the people, even if we could magically figure out what the people really wanted. So we can't simply decide whether a country is democratic or not by asking, "Is the government doing what the people want?" since the rules determine what it looks like the people want.